Principal Spine and Pain Consultants have partnered with Kalypso Wellness Centers to bring ketamine infusion therapies to North Texas to fight chronic pain. According to the CDC, 50 million Americans suffer from chronic pain and depression affects about 16 million American adults every year.
Ketamine has a long history of being used in the operating room during surgery and has been included on the World Health Organization’s most essential medicines. More recent studies show that ketamine can treat depression, anxiety, bipolar, PTSD, pain, inflammation as well as migraines and headaches.
Ketamine works to counteract these health issues by working on several different pathways of the brain. These pathways are important for how the brain interprets and regulates signals. For example, the longer that a patient has had depression, the more dysfunctional neural pathways can become. Ketamine works to repair the damage of those pathways.
According to Dr. Scott Worrich, one of the founders of Kalypso Ketamine, patients who could benefit the most from ketamine treatments are those suffering from depression or chronic pain and who have not yet found a medication that works for them. He says that ketamine could be a good option for patients who have tried and failed with other therapies.
Ketamine has been used more frequently in the last few years, with more than 5,700 infusions administered since 2016. Kalypso Ketamine has been shown to be effective between 90 and 95 percent of the time, with less than five percent showing side effects. Kalypso has a patent pending for the formulation they have created and their process for administering ketamine, and the company expects the final patent to come down later this year.
Dr. Paul Kurian, who is a partner at the new infusion clinic in Dallas, says that he is excited about the potential in his clinic. He says, “It’s not just for the patients that are in pain, or patients whose medications haven’t been helping them, it’s also for patients with PTSD, depression, fibromyalgia, and anxiety. That’s the good thing about this infusion treatment—it treats a wide array of symptoms and conditions.”
